Listening to Radio Paradise right now, working on freelance projects. The latest is a web site for First Church Christ, Scientist in Hayward California, the church I attended growing up. Got the first layout finished and sent to the person in charge of leading the commitee for the project.

I’ve noticed an interesting correlation between the genre of music I listen to and the type of activity it inspires. For example, Radio Paradise plays a very ecclectic mix of music. I’ve found that when I listen to RP, I tend to wander from one activity to the next. It’s very good for contemplative activities, where there isn’t a lot of pressure. Like surfing the web, or hanging out, or just listening to music. It’s very nice.

However, RP is not for all time. When I’ve got a big project, where it requires my full attention for hours at a time, and includes coding as well as design, my preference is often for Digitally Imported techno music. I usually tune in whatever’s the high stream on Shoutcast. No commercials, basically CD-quality music, for free. That is a beautiful thing.

Other times, I’ll listen to 80’s music, again, via Shoutcast. With all the variety out there, when I’m working at my desk it’s pretty much Shoutcast streaming music all the time. Sometimes I’ll listen to NPR on the radio if I feel like it, but it’s not the best for working to, particularly if the job requires mental concentration on things like PHP code.

Time for bed. I was up til 5:45 am yesterday morning working on a project for GlobalStreams converting many graphics from .png to .gif (a step back in graphics-format elegance, a step forward in the application not crashing, had the side-effect of cleaning up the code as well since IE doesn’t natively support transparent .pngs). 🙂

BTW — I usually use Winamp for my listening habit on my Vaio laptop, not that it matters. On my G3 I still use Audion, but I’ve got my laptop piped into the stereo system these days, so that’s what I use.